1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to on-demand accessibility services and more particularly to an accessibility tool that provides accessibility services on the fly and cost efficiently tailored to the specific situation and to the needs of the particular individual availing herself or himself of the accessibility services.
2. Background Description
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) launched the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to promote and achieve Web functionality for people with disabilities on Apr. 7, 1997. See, www.w3.org/Press/WAI-Launch.html. In acknowledging the importance of making the Web usable by anyone, regardless of individual capabilities and disabilities, Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the W3C and inventor of the World Wide Web affirmed the commitment of the W3C “to removing accessibility barriers for all people with disabilities—including the deaf, blind, physically challenged, and cognitive or visually impaired.” Id. Recognizing the need for making Web access available to all regardless of disability, W3C instituted WAI “in coordination with organizations around the world, (to pursue) accessibility of the Web through five primary areas of work: technology, guidelines, tools, education and outreach, and research and development.” See, www.w3.org/WAI. Thus, Web site content increasingly is being provided in multiple forms or formats to achieve these accessibility goals.
Unfortunately, especially for pre-existing content, conversion costs have proven to be prohibitive, making it difficult for most service providers to convert content so as to make suitably accessible services available. In particular, it may be very difficult to justify converting large volumes of archived data, much of which may have very limited use and never be used in one form or another. For example, a company may have thousands of hours of available audio material that may be accessed over the company's Web site. However, transcribing all of that available audio material, e.g., for people with hearing impairment, would be very expensive. There is a chance that hearing impaired persons will not look at much of the transcribed materials. Similarly, some material with graphic content may seldom, if ever, be visited by persons with visual impairment. However, Web sites may contain descriptions that are not very thorough, requiring a visually impaired person to sift through mountains of material just to find that a particular site or material is not of interest. Again, converting web pages that are specially designed to be accessible by visually impaired is a very expensive proposition, especially given the possibility that a visually impaired person may never look at a given site. Similarly, others with different disabilities may qualify for On-Demand Accessibility Services.
For example, a teacher or professor giving a lecture may place reading materials on the Internet, make on-line reading assignments or make material available for a distance learning course. Normally, this is done without considering that learning disable students may be unable to access the on-line materials appropriately, e.g., read and understand the text. Again, it may be very difficult to anticipate how to prepare educational materials for students taking into account all of the many learning disabilities. Further, the preparation effort may be unnecessary since it is unlikely that the students include persons with all of those learning disabilities.
Meetings pose another problem. Typically, a stenographer or sign language interpreters must be employed to provide real-time transcription during for hearing impaired attendees. It is very difficult to provide transcription services or have sign language interpreters available all of the time, even if the transcription is done remotely, e.g., by telephone. Speech recognition has limited accuracy and so, does not entirely solve this problem either, regardless of whether it is provided over the phone or directly at the meeting, e.g., with a microphone. Further, the most effective transcription service may depend upon the circumstances of the particular meeting, class, etc. For example, a relay service may employ an inexperienced writer to assist in transcribing a meeting; meeting transcriptions may by necessity be done by stenographers; an acoustic model may be on file for a particular speaker and, therefore, speech recognition software may suffice for transcription; or, a meeting may be transcribed with a PDA digitizer or cellular telephone that can compress the audio (to maintain audio quality) and send the compressed audio to a server for speech recognition transcription, which receives and decodes the compressed audio with a high degree of accuracy.
Thus, there is a need for an accessibility tool that provides accessibility services on the fly and cost efficiently tailored to the specific situation and to the needs of the particular individual availing herself or himself of the accessibility services.